Redemptive Dreams

An essential piece in California Studies, Redemptive Dreams: Engaging Kevin Starrs California offers the first critical engagement with the vision of Californias most ambitious interpreter. While Starrs multifaceted and polymathic vision of California offered a unique gazesynthesizing central features, big themes, and incredible problems with the propitious golden dreamhis eight-volume California Dream series, along with several other books and thousands of published articles and essays, often puzzled historians and other scholars. Historians in the contemporary school of critical historiography often found Starrs narrative approachseeking to tell the internal drama of the California storyto be less attuned to the most important work happening in the field. Such a perspective fails to acknowledge key developments in historical subfields like Black and African American Studies, Chicana/o/x Studies, Asian Studies, Native Studies, and others that draw from the narrative in their critical work and how this relates to Starrs contribution. But it also neglects Starr as a theological interpreter. Along with being a major figure in California institutional life, with literary output spanning genres from journalism to critical cultural and political commentary, to history and memoir, Starrs unique contribution to California Studies as a distinctly Catholic historian has yet to be adequately understood. Through his lived experience as a devout Catholic to the particular theological features of this faith tradition that animated his views, this critical sociological perspective sheds new light on his project. With contributions from sociology, history, and theology, akin to investigations appearing in Theology and California: Theological Refractions on Californias Culture (Routledge), Redemptive Dreams offers interdisciplinary perspectives that highlight key features inherent in interdisciplinary theological reflection on place and illuminates these diverse disciplinary discourses as they appear in Starrs articulation of the California Dream. Such a vision remains important for reckoning with Californias place in the world.